


Cleaning Up (Gone)

by thatsrightdollface



Series: KamiHaji Week 2018 [4]
Category: Kamisama Hajimemashita | Kamisama Kiss
Genre: Angst day, Gen, Human Aging, Loss, Post-Canon, veeeeeeery post-canon ahahaha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 20:47:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15714789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Nanami’s gone, now, the way all human things go in time.  Mizuki is cleaning up her room.





	Cleaning Up (Gone)

**Author's Note:**

> KamiHaji Week Day 4: Angst Day.... Mmmm. Thank you for reading this, if you do, and I hope you like it! Have a wonderful day.
> 
> (Sorry I'm flooding the Kamisama Hajimemashita tag, btw... Ahhhh, I didn't really think this "Posting All The Stories for the Weekly Challenge" thing through!)

Mizuki was sorting through Nanami Momozono’s left-behind room, just then, and trying not to think about anything at all.  At first he’d wanted to leave everything in there, preserved exactly as she had left it.  A corner of the world that still remembered all the sides of her, everything she had been – a bright, laughing girl who’d wanted to forgive everyone, everyone (and Mizuki, too) …  A chosen, unsuspecting land god, bantering with immortals and weaving together her Shikigami, Mamoru, to protect whatever on Earth needed protecting.  A mother, a friend, an unrequited love.  Nanami’d been so many things, before she’d faded into still bones and skin gone thin as tissue paper.

But then, of course, the shrine had begun to smell of rotten peaches – peaches from a stash forgotten by Nanami’s bed, that maybe she’d been planning to cook or something during the day she never woke up for.  Things were getting unsteady, there at the end.  She was forgetting things, and Mizuki was reminding her of them in a voice he really hoped didn’t sound as panicked as he felt.  More and more, that was happening, until now…

Until now.

And so…  Mizuki was tidying things up, right?  Mostly he was just going to do all the laundry, he told himself, and check around for candy stashes or whatever else might bring in little scurrying things.  There were plenty of scurrying things to hunt in the world outside the shrine, of course, and generally the sort of lizards and turtles Mizuki went after didn’t care for chocolate anyway.

If Tomoe had been alive, still, he would have done this part.  Sifting through Nanami’s things, deciding what to keep…  Or, you know, being _expected_ to decide what to keep.  Mizuki wasn’t throwing anything away.  Not yet.  Maybe not ever?  Nanami’s room could stand like a plum tree suspended under the lake, held cupped in time as if in a human snowglobe.  Like his Lady Yonomori’s tree; like his lost shrine, flooded long ago.

Mizuki wasn’t throwing anything away, yet, and Tomoe had flickered out…  What?  Two years before?  Something like that.  Mizuki was surprised how much he missed that nagging fox, even now.  It was funny – he’d suspected he would miss Tomoe some, but he hadn’t known how it would taste until he couldn’t spit the feelings out again.

Mizuki swept dirt out from under the wardrobe – Mizuki polished hair ornaments and kept his breathing mostly steady, his face as blank as it could be.  He recognized so many of the photographs he found…  He knew the slope of Nanami’s chosen walls around him just the way he knew her novels and bedtime slippers.  He knew them the same way he’d known Lady Yonomori’s plum trees before they’d become so strange.  Before he’d made one unchanging, so none of the flowers could even remember how to fall.  You know.

Sometimes, Mizuki wondered if he would outlive everyone he loved.  When he’d mentioned something like that to Lord Mikage, once – bitterly, quietly, like the cold at the bottom of a pond – Mizuki’s newest god had squeezed his arm.  Just a little, like he understood, or wanted to understand somehow.  Lord Mikage hadn’t said anything at all, which was the best way, really.

There were twists to being a Shikigami…  A familiar…  A divine wish given breath.  There were twists to living so long into a world full of newness.  Mizuki still sometimes felt like he might wake up and find himself back years and years ago, somehow, and nothing lost at all.  Maybe it would be just about time for Nanami to head to the Divine Assembly; maybe Lady Yonomori would appreciate a little help pinning up her hair.

It was when he found the note Nanami had left him just under her jewelry box that Mizuki let himself cry.  He cried into his sleeve, then, of course…  It would’ve been a shame to get the paper all smeary.  Nanami had written to him months ago, apparently.  Wanting to give her love one last time, no matter what.  And there, at the top of the page, was Mizuki’s name.  His name in Nanami’s handwriting for the last, last time.

She’d doodled them both down at the bottom, too – a smiling snake and a girl with a flower in her hair, as if the years had held still around them after all – which was almost too much to look at, honestly.  Mizuki would work up to it.  If he had anything at all in the world it was time, and time, and time.


End file.
